


Mockingbird

by vega_voices



Category: NCIS
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-08
Updated: 2011-09-08
Packaged: 2017-10-23 13:27:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/250791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vega_voices/pseuds/vega_voices
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Jenny doesn’t know what hurts Ziva more – when Hamas lobs missiles at Israeli settlements or when her people retaliate. She has never lived in peace and, Jenny fears, she never will. It is a world few in the United States can comprehend and one that is as foreign to Jenny as Serbia was all those years ago.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Mockingbird

_**NCIS Fic: Mockingbird**_  
 **Title:** Mockingbird  
 **Author:** [](http://vegawriters.livejournal.com/profile)[**vegawriters**](http://vegawriters.livejournal.com/)  
 **Fandom:** NCIS  
 **Pairing:** Flashbacks of Jenny/Gibbs  
 **Rating:** T  
 **Timeframe:** Judgment Day.  
 **A/N:** This is, right now, a one shot. I might expand on it, but it’s an idea that hasn’t left me alone since Ziva’s “It’s complicated” answer to Gibbs when he asked her if she wanted kids. So, here it goes.  
 **Disclaimer:** I keep falling in love with beautiful characters already written by other people. If CBS is looking for a young, up and coming writer who will devote herself wholeheartedly to the process, I’m the right girl. Otherwise, I make no money from this. NCIS, Ziva, Jenny, and the team belong to other people. I’m just walking with them for a while.

 **Summary:** _Jenny doesn’t know what hurts Ziva more – when Hamas lobs missiles at Israeli settlements or when her people retaliate. She has never lived in peace and, Jenny fears, she never will. It is a world few in the United States can comprehend and one that is as foreign to Jenny as Serbia was all those years ago._

 _Step by step  
Heart to heart  
Left, right, left  
We all fall down  
Like toy soldiers_

A song Ziva always liked is running through her head. Travelling through Europe with the beautiful Israeli assassin, Jenny learned more about music than she’d ever been exposed to even in Paris or Serbia. Of all the things she knows she is going to miss when the end comes, the deepest sense of melancholy comes when she realizes she will never share a late night drink –or car ride - with Ziva again.

In private moments she allows herself a smile when she remembers dancing under the Parisian lights with Jethro, how he spun her out and close again, how they fit so perfectly together. The romantic she pretended to not be had fallen in love when he stroked her hair back and kissed her and it was only that she was more frightened of love than he was that she pushed him away and left him sitting in Paris, wondering what he’d done wrong.

Now she sits in a dirty, abandoned diner with his mentor and she is thinking of what she learned from the girl she mentored. Ziva loved rap the way suburban American kids loved heavy metal. She’d watch as Ziva fell into a hypnotic state while the music danced in her mind, the wheels of the car lifting off dusty roads while they outran IED’s and ambushes.

In Israel and Palestine, music is a true form of rebellion, a way to spread the word about changing the system. Raging against the machine in ways American teens only dream of, they risk imprisonment and death simply to get on stage and sing. Once, standing outside a nightclub, Jenny watched three American agents storm the back door and haul the performers into a van. She is a patriot, she believes in her country and the missions assigned, but it was then that she started to understand why so many groups hated the United States.

Ziva is the next generation. A child of the wars between her people and Palestine, she has little patience for American imperialism, Palestine anger, or Israeli defensiveness. She is tired of watching people die. She is tired of killing people. Jenny doesn’t know what hurts Ziva more – when Hamas lobs missiles at Israeli settlements or when her people retaliate. She has never lived in peace and, Jenny fears, she never will. It is a world few in the United States can comprehend and one that is as foreign to Jenny as Serbia was all those years ago.

But the next generation is Ziva’s. Leaders to rise from the ashes of the messes caused by Jenny and people like her. Jenny knows why she fights so hard, why her eyes are so shielded. It is a secret even she was not supposed to know, one discovered by accident shortly after they were partnered together. She wonders if Nadia knows what a hero her mother is and if she understands the sacrifices she has made to help keep her safe.

The little girl dances before her eyes. She saw her only once; they made a pit stop in Cairo, anxious to shake off the cobwebs of their drive. Shaken by border check after border check and the IED they’d barely escaped, they’d tumbled from the car in front of a nondescript house and been ushered inside by a woman whose demeanor and style was so very similar to Ziva’s that at first Jenny could have sworn they were sisters. She’d been close. Cousins.

A little girl stood on wobbly legs in the hallway, curly hair poking out from all sides of her head, big round eyes looking up at Ziva with a mixed sense of relief and abandonment.

“Nadia!”

It was the first, and only time, Jenny ever saw the solider cry. They never spoke of that night; while Ziva kissed her daughter goodbye, Jenny prayed she would never need to learn her mother’s skills.

Children had never been on her radar screen. With Jethro, when she rolled with him on beds in Paris and Serbia and Moscow, she’d been grateful for protection they used. Children didn’t fit into her five point plan and the pain she saw in Jethro’s eyes whenever he looked at a child was enough to break her heart. She’d always assumed he wanted children but couldn’t have them. Knowing the truth, she wonders if he knows about Ziva’s loss. She wonders about Ziva’s own plans and what went wrong. A child clearly had not been part of them and while she solves crimes in America, someone else raises her daughter.

The gun is heavy in her hands. She won’t survive this firefight and she has made her peace with that. She knows that her image is of the tough-girl who is soft around the edges, but she does not relish a life of physical deterioration. Already her hands shake too much to control the gun safely. Her lips and tongue trip on her words. Her lungs ache when she twists the wrong way. Huntington’s is genetic and maybe that is why her father killed himself. She refuses to believe he was on Rene Benoit’s take, but she remembers his shaking hands and the headaches that came so suddenly. If it is true, she is glad to die believing otherwise because she could not have held back any more than Jeanne did.

It is the last secret she will forever keep. She ruined Jeanne’s life by sending Tony undercover, she will not reveal that the young doctor was the one to pull the trigger and end her father’s life.

Fathers and daughters. The endless cycle. Ziva never mentioned Nadia’s father, but Jenny suspects he is not absent. Rene loved Jeanne. Jethro, Kelly. Fathers and daughters. She only hopes hers is waiting for her at the end of the day.

It is not her generation that will break the cycle.

Dust catches her attention. They are coming.

 _~fin~_


End file.
